I'm preparing features for a neural network which I'll run in Keras and TensorFlow. The features are generated in Oracle. There I also replace null values. I'm not doing normalization on the database because this depends on the chosen sample. Normalization will be done in Python. For my use case, which is a binary classification problem (fraud detection), the presence of null values also correlates with the target variable. Therefore, I would like to preserve this information for the model.
My proposal would be to create an additional binary column called varName_isnull
which encodes the presence of a Null in the varName
column. In other aggregated features, this binary column would also be used for example to calculate the number of Null values for a particular grouping (i.e. credit card) per unit of time.
Is my proposal reasonable? Are there any alternative representations and if yes what would be their advantages?